How to install and use vtop graphical terminal activity monitor on Linux

The vtop is a graphical activity monitor for the command line written in Node.js. How do I install vtop on my Linux server? From the project page:

Command-line tools like “top” make it difficult to see CPU usage across multi-process applications (like Apache and Chrome), spikes over time, and memory usage. That’s why we created vtop. Vtop is a free and open source activity monitor for the command line. It’s written in node.js and can be easily extended

Posted by: Vivek Gite

The author is the creator of nixCraft and a seasoned sysadmin, DevOps engineer, and a trainer for the Linux operating system/Unix shell scripting. Get the latest tutorials on SysAdmin, Linux/Unix and open source topics via RSS/XML feed or weekly email newsletter.

Your support makes a big difference:

I have a small favor to ask. More people are reading the nixCraft. Many of you block advertising which is your right, and advertising revenues are not sufficient to cover my operating costs. So you can see why I need to ask for your help. The nixCraft takes a lot of my time and hard work to produce. If everyone who reads nixCraft, who likes it, helps fund it, my future would be more secure. You can donate as little as $1 to support nixCraft:

2 comment

Interestingly, it doesn’t show the proper CPU usage in the process list window. It shows the proper usage in the graph, but I have a VMWare VM currently doing a process that’s eating up (according to htop) 376% CPU (4 virtual CPUs, 400% is all 4 pegged). vtop shows in the graph that we’re nearly pegged, but the process list just has vmware listed once, taking up a mere 9.1% of the CPU.

vtop is neat, but for accuracy on my particular system, I’ll stick to top and htop.